Why Does Canada Have a Queen?

The Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, 1953-2022.

Canada has a queen because the founders of Confederation were determined to govern the country under the system that most of them had known since birth.  Indeed, under rule by either Britain or France, second born (the term I use for European colonists-First Nations Canadians I call first born, and yes, it is the truth to also say the word colonizers to mark the ruling powers sending people over in the first place), there had always been a crowned head and ruling aristocracy calling the shots back in the mother countries.  There was, of course, a marked journey toward something resembling our modern elected representatives, especially in Britain under the House of Commons (and to a lesser extent, the Burgh Commissioners in pre-Union Scotland).  By the time Canada had become a unique Dominion within the British Empire in 1867, elected representatives made up the bulk and most politically powerful elements in British government, a long struggle since the 1640's when the Crown succumbed to the political will of Parliament... or rather the House of Commons... or rather a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.  OK, so that really happened in the 1650's, but the nuances can be tricky.

The distaste of anything monarchial or lordly in the United States did not exactly happen overnight in 1776, nor did representative government suddenly emerge there as such.  The colonies had their own constituent assemblies, albeit with voting rights limited to land-owning males.  The Founding Fathers, of course, were not openly in love with Democratic principles, despite what the national mythos might say these days.  There were exceptions in the more passionate people like Thomas Paine, and after he got a taste of France, Thomas Jefferson (which of course is a whole other story), but by and large the Fathers were Republicans (the philosophy of government, not the modern party) because they wanted power to rest in the hands of an educated electorate with an eye to the broader picture of history and the future.  They were somewhat afraid of the passion of the mob, some because of concerns of anarchy, some because of an elitism, some because of an concern over the stability of the young country.  Not all of them, in fact, wanted to throw out the concept of monarchy, at least not right away.  Blame even focused early on toward the distant elected body of the lower house of Parliament.  The King and Lords were rich, for the most part, but they held wealth passed down through generations and while greed stops nowhere, the concern was that some in the House of Commons were more concerned with fattening up their portfolios rather than engaging in discourse about how best to govern for the common good.  Sound familiar?  These days we call such corrupt politicians "shills" or in the pocket of some monied interest, and it seems that they are largely in control of things.

Of course, those with inherited wealth and titles are not above corruption, but the blame for mismanagement and disaster was harder to avoid in these cases.  Famously, the Duke of Buckingham botched a raid on France so badly that he looked like a traitor to his country!  He couldn't hide behind a defense of "well, vote me out, then".  An assassin channeled the fury of the populace and permanently ended his mistakes.  Truth be told, as much fun as it might seem to have such a pirate ship mentality take care of our political problems, well, we all decided, gradually, that representative democracy was instead the way to go.  I certainly think so.  The thinkers, politicians, economists, etc. that created new governments in the United States, Canada, and far beyond our shores did as well.  

In the United States, however, a more hands off approach would emerge from multiple sides of the political spectrum, born of the Federalism that saw its birth pangs as far back as the Magna Carta.  Initially, the Founding Fathers produced the Articles of Confederation out of a fear of how government can tyrannize private citizens and bring about an interruption of the free flow of commerce.  Capitalism was in it's young adulthood, and the colonies and Britain were the birth place of the philosophy as we have come to recognize it.  Alas, the Articles proved weak and ineffective, largely thanks to the American independent spirit.  A Constitution would emerge once independence from Britain had been secured, a largely stable document that has thus far managed to endure and act as the law of the land.

Canada was another story.  Seemingly in a continuation of "Tories" (conservatives, sort of) vs. "Whigs" (liberals, sort of), while the United States was all about keeping an eye on the wheel of the ship while letting it sail where the wind may provide opportunity (read: Whigs), Canada was dominated by a more paternalistic mentality that seemingly embraced some idealistic stability of the more controlled times of "before Capitalism", or rather mercantilism (read: Tories).  To date, this is why even conservative elements in Canada don't consider public healthcare or welfare spending to be the devil (though this is currently undergoing a bit of a challenge), whereas in the United States the "hands off" approach has tended to dominate (though this is currently undergoing a bit of a challenge).  As I noted in my last article, I've come to see this as a result of an unfinished war we have been fighting since those 1640's I talked about earlier.  The players just seem different.  Anyway, before I dive to deeply into that rabbit hole, what does any of this happen to do with Canada having (had) a queen?

Paternalism, or the concept of governing like a father.

In the United States, the hands off approach tended to form because a distrust of official class divisions, which on paper sailed away with any surviving and remaining Loyalists at the end of the American Revolution/War of Independence.  Some went back to Britain, some stayed and made the best of it, but many went to Canada.  There, over a long period of struggle that we have not really resolved, they found a an existing paternalistic society in the form of the French-Canadians, and while the English speakers largely took refuge in places like Nova Scotia or Upper Canada (now Ontario), Montreal became a famous hub of interaction of ideals and philosophies and two worlds started talking to each other.  One can easily see that while the 13 colonies had to fight to find common ground in order to survive, with South Carolina and Massachusetts miraculously finding political harmony enough to muster political will, in Canada this was taken to a whole other level.  Confederation was a difficult baby to birth, and these days hot headed elements popping out of the landscape screaming "Quebec, Alberta, etc." prove that the struggle continues.  

Some say that it only happened because we did not want to be Americans.  We were more comfortable with paternalism, that is to say the government acting as parent, specifically father, than the Founding Fathers ever were (though Hamilton had a strong attraction to it in some ways).  To a degree, we largely still are.  This is not to say we are not into elections and individual liberty!  Those are good, necessary things, reminders of the accountability government has to all of us, that it rules by the consent of the governed.  Yet we still have a crown.  We delight in being Albertans, Ontarians, Quebecois almost as much, if not more so, than being Canadian, and yet when push comes to shove, we also have a very strong sense of community, which has thus far held us together.  Americans have it too, and this is going to explain a lot about the real question here: "why does Canada still have a crown?"

Americans sort of had one.  

He was many things, but George Washington is remembered as the quiet man in the room who everyone shut up to listen to.  He inspired unity in a way that no other president has since done so, and no other figure had managed to in his own time.  He is most significantly remembered for not taking a crown, for cementing into the national identity the concept of fair elections where one does one's duty and then moves on.  He was the chairman of the board that the new country needed.  Ever since 1660, when Britain decided that it needed that chairman of the board to come back after they chopped the head off King Charles I, flirted with a failed state under Cromwell, and then was plunged into the mess that both the Founding Fathers and Fathers of Confederation never wanted to repeat, even disconnected by centuries and ocean, so far away from such a chaotic "what's next?".  

Canada decided to stick with the existing British model of political parties forming ruling coalitions in an elected lower House of Parliament.  The leader of the dominant party would be a Prime Minister, just like back in London.  Much like the President, however, the Prime Ministers would often fall short of being the figure of unity and a manifestation of the larger nation, that chairman of the board.  Not being American, having a transcontinental railroad, other elements of the defensive nationalism that Canada may fairly be labelled as having in her history, these were not good enough reasons to stick together.  Community, on the other hand, took a Canadian identity out of the hands of negative definitions and moved from I am X because not Y to we are all in this together.  Canada not only drew its inspiration of government from what had been functioning in Britain in evolving form since the 1200's (or earlier, if we consider Henry II to be the founder of our modern rule of law), but had a figurehead already in place.  Her name was Victoria.  

Queen Elizabeth looks at Queen Victoria

I fully acknowledge that she has a complicated history.  She didn't, for example, support female voting, and while she was largely removed from the political process involved in colonization and atrocities like the Irish and Indian famines, she was still crowned while it was all happening.  That said, she also knew how to cool heads and tell, as Elizabeth would later put it, "grey haired old men" to think things through.  Like Elizabeth, and indeed like myself, she didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, and had a historical perspective to consider options with.

By the time she ascended to the throne in Britain, she was roughly in the same role as King Charles is today.  There were already vicious political factions vying for control, philosophical dominance, etc. by a hundred years prior to her crowning.  At the end of the day, however, your radical reformer and most stolid aristocrat alike all shut up when she would enter the room.  This is not because she was a figure of worship, but because she was, well, outside of the political realm.  Yes, much like King Charles, she lived in splendor and once she became queen, never really had to want for anything ever again, but it served as a golden cage from which she could not necessarily live her own life.  She was unelected, but she was also not making the decisions about how we ought to be governed; we had and have elections for that.  She was, and he is, however, the living reminder that those elected leaders cannot run amok and have to be accountable to us and the Constitution which is there to remind us, in paper, of accountability.  It may be bold to say so, but these days, Americans could use another Washington like that.  Alas, as he warned in his farewell address, his office got political.  A new crown is not the answer for the United States.  The selection process would be impossible, to say the least, but alas, the modern nature of the Presidential office requires an exceptional individual to serve as inspiring more than just consumer confidence.

But while the United States is best known for forging a new path, or at least trying to a new form of one, Canada looks to the future by drawing strength, and these days, more sobriety, from the past.  To quote King Charles in his first Royal speech made earlier today:

"In her life of service we saw that abiding love of tradition, together with that fearless embrace of progress, which make us great as Nations." 

He smiled a bit when he said that line, and no, it wasn't a smirk.  He said it because he was aware of his role, and hers, in wearing ermine and a jeweled crown while promoting various freedoms.  His mother, for example, was very much opposed to Apartheid in South Africa.  As early as her 1947 speech about the Commonwealth (which used, a product of its time, words we now shirk at, like "Imperial"), she was committed to leaving behind an empire and moving towards a global scale of cooperation and assistance.  The most ardent supporter of this is, well, the crown.  Many crowns in one person.  In Canada, we have 11 crowns shared by the same person, Federalism born from a Unitary state, the struggle that was the excuse for starting that fight that began in the 1640's, but turned out to be more of a power and wealth struggle egged on by religious fervor (sound familiar?).  You see, in the person of the monarch, who really lives in a manicured, arranged life, and is born to not be themselves, we have the representation of shared history, the legacy of the journey toward accountability, the rule of law, and the balance between freedom and the responsibility we have to each other.  We didn't just wake up one day and say "freedom", "elections", etc.  

The realm is not, you see, the extension of the will of the sovereign, but a community with whom the crown acts as a living embodiment of a unity over many voices and a desire to live free... together.

It's hard to go it alone.  A tyrant looks at all of us differently than just us.  That sentence can easily be at home in both the United States and Canada, no/non?

Canada still has a queen/king because we value democracy, the rule of law, political accountability, and the path to progress, rooted in a history that inspires and shows us how we got there, and how to avoid doing the same dumb stuff that took us a for a tumble or let a tyrant take control.

 Ten years ago, I started this blog with the intention of sharing personal reflections on the landscape, history, art, and current events surrounding the North American continent (important: inclusive of Mexico).  Life intervened here and there, and the blog largely took a vacation from 2015 onward.  I spent less time traveling, more time absorbed into the 9-5, and after 2017 I started looking back on what I had written and realized I was perhaps focused on the wrong subject matter.  In 2022, I find myself looking back at a decade of intellectual development and bearing witness to noticing how much my underlying bias went into my writing.  To our detriment, historical methodology is often ignored by armchair historians.  I can't really use the excuse that I don't know what this is, as I did pursue the liberal arts in my higher education, albeit in philosophy, theology, and art history rather than history proper.  All things considered, this is not an academic blog as much as a casual blog of reflection, but one also has to consider that history is a volatile subject these days.

My last blog entry was at the dawn of the Trump administration, a time where many governments and societies across the world were (and are) experiencing upheavals in historical memory and current understanding (to put it lightly!).  I stopped writing because my efforts would have been labelled as political, and as a foreign national living in the US, I didn't want to come across as an Ambassador Genet.  I have lived in this country now since 1994 and have paid taxes since 2000, so I figure I can probably say things about the amber waves of grain.

I come back to the blog to make a bold statement:

We are still fighting the English Civil War of 1642-1651.

The players in the conflict then were different enough from our contemporaries to not be able to draw direct comparisons to what sides fit in the picture today, but we definitely still have the dominant elements in play.  While there are no more Puritans (low-church Anglicans aside), we definitely have a booming Evangelical and Pentecostal population throughout the continent, largely in conservative populations in the United States but growing in both Canada and Mexico.  Like the Puritans, they are interested in making their voices heard in politics, and it must be said, interested in legislating their voices over the rest of the population.  On the other side, we no longer have a king or an established church, but we do have a political establishment that has largely been interested in law and order and societal stability, at least until recently.  

To elaborate further is going to take a lot of posts from here on out, especially as I find myself going back to school in terms of really trying to read up on the players in the conflict.  I decided to begin with prime excuse/cause number one, Archbishop William Laud.  While Parliament had many issues to bring them into conflict with the crown, the initial spark that ignited the fire was from Puritans upset about any slight inkling of Popery/Catholicism in the Church of England, to say nothing about King Charles being married to an outwardly devout Catholic, Henrietta Maria, who the state of Maryland is named after.  That factoid is just a reminder that while this is a blog about North America, our post-Columbian history is very much a trans-Atlantic story.  In any event, one could argue that we definitely have our Lauds out there today in the form of political figures interested in the sense of stability brought about by maintaining the Unitary State (power flows down from the top authority), in contrast to our Parliamentarians, those more interested in promoting Federalism (wherein power is shared between top and local authorities).  The lines blur quite a bit here and there, so we end this post with the caveat that our complicated time shares many features with that complicated time, while the particulars definitely vary.

Here's a short clip from the 1970 classic, Cromwell (featuring absolutely brilliant performances across the board), which features the main man getting riled up by some rather bland (from Catholic standards) altar adornments.  Wars of ideas often start from messing with small things.

Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

The Historical Importance Of An Invisible Creek

The brief summer of 2014 which followed the brutal winter of 2013-14 gave your author every reason in the world to be out enjoying the bounty of nature and not wanting to stare at a screen or gather hordes of photos together in an attempt to make sense out of the North American experience.  Well, winter is upon us once again and he finds himself indoors a lot more, even while he takes in the chilly air with confidence that he lives in Michigan and not northern Manitoba.  I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as well as a lot of listening.  The United States is currently in the midst of some of the most bitterly divided political warfare that it has seen in some time, Mexico is busy trying to deal with the fact that perhaps helping PRI regain entrenchment has done little to support growth in the country, to say nothing of stem the tide of violence from the drug cartels, and Canada sleeps above all this in some false sense of superiority.  Some jump into the fray completely ignorant of history and reason and foretell of the apocalypse; others claim they are on intimate terms with both the past and the cause of righteousness and yet present to the public rather obvious revisionist viewpoints of who said what in some document, religious or otherwise, made by a court hundreds of years ago, perhaps not even from our shores. 

Life goes on.  Freedom is maintained enough that most in North America, and yes, including Mexico, individuals can choose to tear away the veil of ignorance and find out the facts behind the truths in our larger story.  That's what this blog is about, my own journey to discovery about our story here in North America, and not just about great people or events or even transitory concepts.  Instead, I take a look at even the small things.  My latest read seems to be taking me for a ride down that particular path; Sarah Vowell has been entertaining and informing me about how taking a look at the small things can help one understand how the bigger picture fits together.  Better put by a really good friend, she takes a look a reality through the perspective of one within the fishbowl.  After all, this is why those who study history and geography even bother to look at details even when the facts are largely laid out in plain sight for them; happenings like revolutions are a bit more complex than the slogans which ignite the passions which drive them.  Sometimes we need to tear down the sacred statues and become iconoclasts in order to prevent such revolutions from turning away from said passions and into the realm of pure legalistic precedent.  Alright, so maybe I have also been reading some of that iconoclast Gore Vidal.  The thing is, I'm back to share some more of what I have found.

And what better little thing to then bring to attention than this charming little discovery:

Does not look like much, does it?  I am sure that most people would never recognize it as anything other than a slight depression in the ground which for some reason was bridged rather than filled and paved like the rest of the surrounding city.  In reality, this is what remains of Dock creek, a small tidal creek that perhaps served as the mark for where William Penn decided to center his capital city of Philadelphia.  The "dry water feature" rests buried in a lovely park behind Carpenters Hall, meeting place of the first Continental Congress ,and, as such, another relic of the city's past that gets largely ignored by the visiting public in favor of bigger, grander things like Independence Hall.  Today, aside from the depression in the ground, the only thing that lets the walker know that anything different was ever here is a plaque set up by the National Park Service.  The plaque lets people know that this center of the famous seat of American political birth was full of not only the gassy overtures of politicians, but also plain, simple swamp gas.  Much like inheritor Washington and predecessor London, this first capital of the United States was a rather wet and marshy affair that has otherwise transformed and been paved over.

Of course, the modern face of Philadelphia tends to look a lot more like this:

Chestnut street at 4th, looking west.

And, as expected, this:

Passyunk and 10th, turning south onto 10th.

She started out as the last grasp of the Atlantic's dominance against the fall line.  This is what makes this little creek so interesting, really.  Philadelphia, you see, is unlike many other cities in that it falls not soundly with the "North", is definitely not part of the "South" either, and while hardly on the ocean and farther away from salt water than even Washington, is definitely more coastal than inland.  Many houses here have gardens that feature a magnolia alongside a spruce, fitting for a city that can be buried by snow in the odd winter and yet experience a summer every bit as unpalatable as any given city further south.  In essence, we have a city that had a noticeably longer growing season than what could be offered by New England and the Hudson valley, thus suitable for plantations, yet not idealistically part of a colony founded otherwise for the sake of individual liberty (in contrast to Jamestown) in which the good land could be used for families of farmer-workers.  We thus have a city founded not in consideration to proximity to the coast and thus the broader market, and yet not so far removed from it as to be deaf to the siren song of international commerce. 

Here we have a city founded on the principles of religious tolerance and a degree of personal liberty that also had an increasing number of African slaves imported into it in the mid-eighteenth century.  Proudest son of the city, Benjamin Franklin, otherwise later noted to be something of an abolitionist, did not actually free his slaves until after the Revolution.  As the creek was covered over, so too was slavery, and the city and her history were simultaneously whitewashed; the colonial federal style look was abandoned for a lot of marble even as Pennsylvania passed the first abolition act in the United States in 1780.  The creek gives us two lessons: not everything is as simple as it seems, and nothing on this earth is immutable.  So, let's take a stroll further up the creek...

North America Exterior: St. Thomas

Remember that harsh and cruel winter some of us living in, say, the vast majority of northern and central North America just went through?  Well it seems that your blogger was caught up in the house looking longingly at the outdoor world covered beneath so much snow that he up and ran outside the moment he saw the first signs of warmth rise to shoo away that mean polar persistent air mass.  April came to show us that our continent is brutally extreme when it comes to seasonal temperature shifts, and all of a sudden the southern Great Lakes were blessed with numbers like 70 rather than numbers like -12 which had been recorded only weeks before in mid-March.  I had intended to write a post about our Caribbean south lawn... er... water feature, but instead found myself playing in the dirt and writing for other blogs.  Have no fear, I came back, found that people were still reading this crazy thing, and decided to make a promised visit to a sample island in the Caribbean, namely St. Thomas.

Now yes, you might have noticed that while St. Thomas is indeed an overseas possession of the United States, you probably also noticed that it is far removed from anything resembling the 50 united colonies back on the mainland.  For starters, she does not even sit on the North American plate, but on the neighboring Caribbean plate.  Her culture is distinctly different, her time zone is a very un-continental/maritime Canadian Atlantic time, and she is way, way more tropical than even the toastiest parts of deep Texas and passably more tropical than rainy Southern Florida.  There is a distinct lack of big box stores here, frost and snow are imaginary concepts, and the island was pretty much still the sunniest and warmest part of Denmark (international version) until a 100 years ago; even Puerto Rico can claim closer heritage with the rest of the United States through colonial Spanish roots.  The island is and was hardly a resort masquerading as a country, however, as it became a going concern when the Danish discovered that using African slaves to ship sugar and rum around the world was profitable, a mercantile heritage which later transformed itself into a breeding ground for tourists and the jewelry industry. 

This has a lot to do with the lay of the land.  St. Thomas is a small place, all of maybe 15 miles across at the most, and quite a lot of it is vertical in nature.  She has beaches, but she also has cliffs and steep descents to the shoreline and is surrounded by incredible coral reefs.  Those looking for broad, level expanses of sand covered over by hundreds of Coconut Palms are probably actually imagining the coral islands of Grand Cayman, Cozumel, or the Bahamas.  That is not to say that the place is far from a dream tropical resort paradise, as the climate manages to stay pleasantly in the 80's with plentiful sunshine and sea breezes a majority of the time.  The backdrop of the vertical nature of the place certainly also adds to the postcard image:

That said, it also presents the average farmer with a bit more blessing than the coral islands.  The soil here is just a little bit more amiable to the ways of the plow, and while slaves made life lucrative for Danish plantation owners, the island was certainly under cultivation.  These days, a simple glance at the satellite map can show that the opposite has largely taken hold; much of the undeveloped landscape has returned to some semblance of the monsoonal forests and possibly savannas which covered much of the Virgin Islands.  Simply put, there is not a whole lot of room for the island's residents to keep the economy going on a subsistence basis or through the use and extraction of natural resources.  In contrast, continued links to the United States have allowed the island to look beyond immediate concerns through an expanded economy, much like the islands always have, at least since the triangular trade got the first bonds set in place.  True, the culture and government was Danish, but the economy surely passed a fair amount of trade to the much more proximate Americans.  Here, as on St. Croix, what does survive in the man-made world of previous eras does not look to far off from, say, a narrow street in colonial Philadelphia, Williamsburg, or Charleston.  The overhanging gables might seem a bit more New Denmark than New England, but then again New England is a far cry from the Carolinas. 

Back to natural things, the island is definitely not what one would call a rainforest, and gets about as much rainfall each year as we do here in Great Lakes country.  That said, despite the presence of cacti and the like, she is also hardly a desert, but something more like a wonderful place which is not too hot, not too dry, not too wet.  Much of what has started to re-vegetate consists largely of tropical forests with deciduous (in the dry season) trees:

This probably made the place very attractive, even to those with money primarily the goal of founding a colony.  Especially in Virgin Islands National Park on neighboring St. John, ruins of many Danish plantations can be found among the recovering vegetation.  Much like the colonial policy of taming the wilderness that took place in the Thirteen Colonies, the Danish colonial pattern was one of using as much of the land to full agricultural potential as possible, and so very little pre-settlement landscape remains in plain view.  That said, while the landscape of much of the Caribbean has been very much turned into an anthropomorphized ecosystem, small bits and pieces of the tropical wonderland that the first Spanish adventurers and colonists made their way to over 500 years ago can be found for those who come here not to shop but to find a place far away, yet ever more abundant with familiar mangroves, Coccothrinax palms of relation to those in the Everglades and Keys, yuccas, and Spanish Moss.  Then too one can find reminders of a world very much similar to that of the ante-bellum United States, albeit a bit further south, a world forever changed from when the First Born once lived here, who like the First Born peoples of the South, cannot really say much... like the original landscape they are long since gone. 

Expanding The Horizon

American Voyages is dedicated to the exploration of North America, which I have thus far defined as being anything a part of our continental plate and landmass, as well as attachments such as the parts of California not on our plate.  Under this definition, I also include Cuba and the Bahamas, which have at least enough common features in fauna, flora, and history to be considered North American.  Where do I draw the line elsewhere, however?  Do I exclude Guatemala and Belize simply because they have more in common with the rest of Central America than they do with Mexico?  Do I refuse to talk about any of the Caribbean, especially when it does have a significant link to our continent?  In general, I started up this blog to show people what they have in their backyard (and as a secondary goal, to dispel myths about Mexico), and the thought of getting just a bit more tropical than what Oaxaca or southern Florida has to offer starts to look more like promoting knowledge about what people have in mind for their next vacation.

Ah, but there are people who live and have lived on the many islands beyond the reach of Floridian or Yucatan beaches.  The history of the three major North American nations is very much connected to what was going on in the Caribbean.  Many of the colonials there set up domestic, semi-representative governments just like the colonials in the North American mainland did.  Alexander Hamilton, along with a great many other British colonists living in the "West Indies", either lived in the Thirteen Colonies/United States or had involvement in trade between the various colonies and Britain.  Much of this trade involved the movement of rum, sugar, spices, and the "commodity" needed to make it all possible, slaves.  In this regard some of those distant islands were not too distant in culture and climate from some of the American South.  Barbados, for one, is very keen on reminding people that much of their population was once in the supplicant position in this culture. 

Many American ports would also bear a bit of a visible connection with distant islands.  New Orleans and Charleston have in many ways seemed more connected with the life of the tropical mariner and chic associations with motherlands back in Europe.  Florida, of course, had for the longest time been the meeting place of the Spanish Caribbean with mainland North America, and still largely is, particularly in Miami.  In return, Cuba has always seemed like another world from the rest of the Caribbean, even after American cultural connections were shut down once Castro took power.  From another angle, Cuba and Mexico have often expressed love and affinity with one another, as if sitting at another table focused on one another and no one else in some grand Latin American ballroom.  The Caymans Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos these days find themselves being sent similar love letters from fellow Commonwealth member Canada; the banks and financial concerns on the islands certainly reflect this budding, if unconsummated relationship.  The story gets more fascinating further south.  So why not shake off the last of the winter blues and visit some of those lands across the Straits of Florida?  Our first destination will be St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Toronto And The Power Of Memory

To a Detroiter, Toronto is a thing of distant majesty, be it seen in either the eyes of envy or romance.  In comparison to a decaying industrial behemoth which once had the possibility of rivaling Chicago or Los Angeles in terms of culture and influence, Toronto looks to be the promise of a Great Lakes capital fulfilled.  Here we have a stable city of incredible economic strength and fortune with all the diversity one would expect of a city the size and importance of New York.  Here we have gleaming skyscrapers, a remarkable landscape of ravines and naturalistic city parks, all within easy travel of anything from oceanic expanses of water to cliffs, mountains, and north woods.  Here we have a city, which while being well-developed, is still so full of promise and young enough to proudly declare that she is far from being finished and ready for so much more.  I always thought so.  Part of me still does.

This, of course, is the viewpoint of an expatriate looking back ever so passionately over that long, so-called undefended border and dreaming of what life without exile in this United States would have been like had I stayed.  Like so many Torontonians, I can only envision my gleaming city as the accepting, open, safe alternative to a post-911 New York.  I would love to envision her as being as equal among names like the city at the mouth of the Hudson, London, Paris, or Hong Kong.  While instead I realistically consider her to be of the same caliber as a San Francisco, Milan, or Sydney, part of me still imagines Toronto to one day, along with Canada, claim her position in the supreme pantheon of global divinities.  She is, after all, extremely well connected and perhaps one of the most tolerant places on the entire planet.  Therein, of course, lies the problem.  Toronto is too Canadian.

Before I have my countrymen come down on me like a bad case of NAFTA, I would very much like to qualify that statement.  I realize how self-hating I sound in writing this, akin to the James Joyce who loved Ireland but for the Irish and their culture (something I could never seem to forgive him for), but the truth of the matter is that so much of the Canadian cultural and political identity is based off of a defensive self-image: namely, we are not American.  Even my presentation here of Toronto proposed that part of her greatness lies in being an alternative to an American city!  Canadian culture, at least what I have known of it from Ontario, the most defensive province of all, has little maple leaves everywhere poised to force Canadians to remember that while we share material culture with the Yankee beast to the south, those little leaves acting as an apostrophe in a fast food sign tell us that we could not be more different.  To a great extent, we are, but again we have the problem in having to point that out to ourselves or the the American tourists who pass through southern Ontario and see strip mall after strip mall standing in silent reminder of just how much control branding has over the world these days... but of course we think instead just about how surely they point and laugh and call us the fifty first state.  Some do, to be fair.

But we also don't look at government, guns, or history the same way.  The border remains largely because a difference of mentality marks far more of a difference between, say, Michigan, New York, or Ohio and Ontario than there is noticeable between Ohio and Kentucky.  Sure, as neighbors we live on the same street, have half the time fought on the same side in battles, to say nothing of fighting in the same battles, and we both eat far too many Big Macs.  The truth remains, however, that we are still neighbors and not part of the same family in the same house.  This truth, time and again, keeps getting neglected by those in the Canada house, at least in the Ontario department.  Those people instead prefer to see their house simply as being either better or worse than the house next door!  Any concept of what is Canadian thus evaporates beneath the heat of the comparison lamp.  Meanwhile, that city of Toronto keeps getting larger, keeps adding in more people from every part of the known world, and turns into some settling basin where the diverse elements never really add something to the mix but tend to keep to themselves.  Unlike New York, where the magic of the city has always been the transformation of cultures into something American and then ultimately into something New York in it's own right, Toronto does not have a Canadian or even Torontonian glue sticking it all into some amazing sculpture.  There is neither assimilation nor destruction here, but, in true Toronto fashion, people lowering their heads to the ground or a phone and ignoring one another.  Here tolerance is taken to the ugly extreme of opted compartmentalization. 

That, of course, is a cultural sin.  No, it is not the apparent evil that is the mutually agreed upon racial and socioeconomic segregation popular in Detroit and Buffalo, the two closest border cities, but it is perhaps just as dangerous considering as how this sort of self-absorption is preventing Toronto from becoming truly world-class at the highest levels.  This sort of selfishness is deadly insomuch as it is passive-aggressive to the point of not even being acknowledged, even by people who look out for that sort of thing, like your author here.  You see, until I was able to see the people avoiding eye contact and concerned about the possibility of random conversation, I did not believe that my Toronto had become so cold and indifferent.  I figured that such an image of the city was the result of a worldly friend who wanted more than the mundane every day of next door.  Torontonians, after all, have a legacy of self-loathing to uphold, at least in the realm of civic pride.  Yet the Toronto that I remembered was through the eyes of a child, who did indeed remember more hopeful people back in the early to mid nineties, who saw those gleaming skyscrapers, and more importantly, who saw that incredible parliamentary mace, gloriously surrendered back to us by the neighbors who finally had to admit that we made it as a country.  When I looked at that mace, when I looked at those old buildings next to those new buildings, I knew what Canada was.  I knew what Toronto was.  I knew that I was the citizen of a country that proclaimed liberty with a dressing of tolerance, a desire to move cautiously forward with a healthy respect for the past, and a passion for freedom both from without and within.

I also remember a small cluster of the most beautiful tree in existence planted out front.  There, in plain sight, I remember three Eastern White Pines not much taller than our teacher, planted surrounding a smaller Colorado Blue Spruce, which then I figured to be nice but unimpressive.  The trees, like the mace, were still part of a Toronto that I simply had refuse to acknowledge had changed, or rather refused to change.

A quarter of a century later, these native pines have grown from the fresh landscaping Christmas tree size into their more natural, flowing, majestic sway.  The American-born Colorado Blue Spruce has grown with them, and in a rather amusing and illuminating way has not managed to overtake its companions, yet probably still draws more attention than the common place pines.  The truth here, though, is that the image has changed somewhat.  Like the city around them, they have remained the same but taken on a much grander form... but those who pass them every day probably don't even look up, as they surely don't look around at what an amazing thing has grown around them in the past thirty years, let alone the past ten.  Instead, Torontonians are busy with the illusion that they are at the top of bottom of the world, depending on perspective; the city has indeed become something global, and yet...  They cannot see the miracle of transformation and continued growth with the fascinating world of formal identity specifics that exist both in the now and then.  Toronto is a city that denies itself a taste of what it can be, what it has been, and even what it has become, amazing in being a living example of philosophical potential being, that "which is possibly everything but actually nothing". 

I do promise to show, as I do in this blog in general, what Toronto is.  Better yet, I invite you to see it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The First Underground Railroad

I know I have been on a kick about the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida lately, but the truth is that this region was an incredibly diverse and storied region until it fought for the wrong side of history during the Civil War.  Yes, here there was the hearth of the house of Southern elite slaveholders and their belles, but there were also the non-slave holding Second Born Georgians, First Born, Spanish, French (of both Hugenot and Royal varieties), long forgotten Austrians, and of course Black people which would soon, through economic reasons, come to outnumber all of these groups.  Needless to say, I also have long loved the majestic world of palm and pine which thrives here in an otherwise humid, bug-infested wild country.  When I recently began to read more about both the birth of slavery and its opposition among abolitionists and freedom-seekers here, I just had to share what a powerful crossroads in history this truly difficult land had become.

No one can argue against the fact that the Spanish colonizers were brutal and racist in their treatment of the First Born, and that they enjoyed watching their conquered subjects tend the fields for them.  That said, it was the English colonizers who were real pros at commercial exploitation of the new land and exotic peoples from just about anywhere on the planet.  The Spanish, you see, were plunderers less than merchants (they kicked out a good portion of their merchant class when they told every Jew in Spain to head out of town in 1492), and they were also enthralled by the concept of converting the planet to Roman Catholicism.  In contrast, the English also plundered, but on a smaller scale (except maybe in India), so as to better gradually set up favorable economic conditions for their cult of free-enterprise.  Oh sure, they had religion too, many Protestant varieties of it in fact, but their concept of spreading the faith was pretty much centered on trying to get freedom for themselves to contemplate and pray as they so wished, which they had to cross an ocean for in the face of Anglican and then Calvinistic and then lip-service Anglican successions of power.  They rejoiced when the First Born converted, but otherwise just regarded them as pagans who could either be helpful to setting up commercial security or harmful in trying to dismantle colonial progress.  The French were another story altogether, and that one takes a while to explain...

Anyway, the Spanish would not hesitate to bring over Africans for use as slaves, but seeing as how plantations of cash crops were but one of many different agendas behind the otherwise important gold-plundering and conversion game, race slavery never developed to the same degree that it did in the English colonies.  Again, this is not to say that it did not happen; many Black communities can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and a few traces of where African slavery did make inroads into Mexico can be found in Veracruz and Guerrero, the two important states of colonial landing of the Mexican coast.  The ban on a Spanish-run slave trade made importation of Africans difficult, if nothing else.  When they wanted slaves, the Spanish could run to the English or Dutch for their needs, which further compounded the general aloofness from the enslavement of Africans.  What's more, racial hatred did not develop in nearly the same way throughout New Spain than it did it the English colonies.  As I state in my post about the most important event in North American history, while the Spanish came as conquerors and extractors, they also often fell in love with the land and the people of the New World.  Mexicans to this day are largely Mestizos of heritage reaching back to both sides of the Atlantic.   Yes, you can find hatred towards the First Born in the Spanish-descended elite of El Salvador or Argentina, but by and large the rest of modern Latin America is a culture resulting from pure exchange rather than separation. 

So it was that when a few runaway slaves heading south from the Carolinas made their way into Florida, they were not immediately chained up and re-enslaved in their new home of Florida.  Rather, they were not only welcomed, but encouraged to keep coming.  Those who chose a more colonial existence in St. Augustine would be required to convert to Catholicism, but often times the Black refugees found a happy existence with the First Born of the area.  Further north, they often helped the refugees through to their freedom, which as usual was a very difficult and terror-filled trip to safety, but down here in the still-largely natural hot and humid subtropical lushness, they had the advantage of not being readily followed by the prone-to-malaria and easily sweat-able northern Europeans.  The Spanish authorities figured that they would be so grateful to make their way into waiting freedom and safety that they would rise up in arms with them, Black beside colonist, against English advances from Georgia.  They were not wrong. 

Some stayed in town, some even enlisted in the Spanish forces.  Others left to form new societies of their own in the wilds, and sometimes they came across the First Born and formed a new culture of this encounter.

Public domain.

You can read more and see some pictures here.  Actually, that website can tell you quite a lot about some of the Black experience I never knew existed.

What Martin Luther King Jr. Day Means

My apologies for the not a lot of activity around here lately.  I did come across something that made me want to jump into a few posts, though.  First:

Q: You really don't talk about the Black experience a lot.  Why not?

A: I generally consider myself well-informed as to the details of said experience, but I am intimidated by my overall lack of specialized knowledge therein.  I like to do topics of posting some amount of justice, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to putting off posting.  That said, my recent love affair with gobbling up every last detail of everything Southern has started to lead me into a lot of reading on the Black experience.  It's not a world entirely foreign to me either; I have a fair degree of involvement in religious ministry in Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI where I can definitely say I got immersed in various facets of the Black experience.  One of the most amazing features I came across was the prevalence of town hall style democratic participation, something that one would figure is entirely absent from any large developed areas and relegated mostly to the land of small farming towns in Indiana or Iowa. 

The two mentalities are not so different that they have never existed in unison; most Black people living in the United States and Canada, at least before the Second World War, were agriculturally focused and lived in smaller communities.  The first Black people seeking a better life in Canada settled not in Kingston or Montreal but in Amherstburg (just south of Windsor, Ontario) or in Oro-Medonte, a largely rural community about an hour and change north of Toronto.  In the United States, before employers like Ford attracted many Black people through equal pay and hiring opportunity, racial demographics were spread pretty even between rural and urban areas; cities were often full of struggling immigrants who were often responsible for creating discriminatory conditions no better than in the more timid parts of the South.  This might have been due to a distaste for even more competition in addition to any racism passed on the other groups already living here by such times.

This was nothing compared to what Black people were dealing with in the South, however.  Read the following article to get a taste of just what that meant, and just what yesterday's public holiday means:

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did

It's sobering, to say the least.  It puts things into perspective, like the question "Why don't I talk about the Black experience a lot?"  I decided to wait a day until posting this so the hysteria of everyone wanting to post about it died down and we could look at things from a vantage of reality over popularity. 

Is It Racist To Like Southern Gardens (Or Anything)?

A little interlude before we head back to Charleston.  In fact, this sort of sets up that post, trying to look at Southern Gardening from a different historical background and responding to a very serious question/accusation that I received e-mailed to me about recent posts on the South:

Q: Surely you are aware of the intense racism and inhumanity that plagues your beloved Southern "culture", polite gardens or architecture or otherwise?  The South is an embarrassment on this country and you are exposing some personal racist tendencies toward history here.

The South has amazing agricultural and gardening potential.  The lowcountry affords a long growing season which can account for the vast majority of the year, while the backcountry offers moderation in the region's otherwise blistering summer sun and enough winter chill to permit northern delights to slip in the scenery.  Naturally speaking, there is so much of everything right in soil, sun, and moisture that nature can run rampant here given the chance to.  This can result in seemingly unstoppable plagues of kudzu, but it can also result in an incredibly potent power behind natural reclamation. 

American Voyages has thus far taken us on a tour of the landscapes of the South and the sentiment they have held for the region's inhabitants, both first and second born.  In some cases, the flora and fauna are beloved and considered quintessential to understanding the character of the culture which has developed here.  In others, such as with the many pines of the region, the backdrop has been simply wallpaper and, at best, a bonus feature.  Here, as in so many other places, exotic species often have taken center stage in the hearts and minds of those controlling the landscape.  And why not?  Especially in an age where so many pleasures are deemed to come best from artificial sources, reveling in biological beauty and charm is hardly something to be looked down upon, exotic or native model notwithstanding.  If I lived in the South, I would surely experiment would any number of palms, broadleaved evergreens, azaleas, amaryllis, hardy citrus, etc.  The attraction is hardly a new one, either.  Compared to the continental winters experienced in New England and as far south as Philadelphia, the Virginians and Carolinians found that when they had acquired enough security and basic economic vitality, they could start living dreams perhaps even out of the reach of their rank back in England. 

Of course, some of these dreamers did so at the expense of their fellow, enslaved, human persons, but there were also those who did not.  The ordinary Virginians and Carolinians, and certainly almost all of the Georgians found that while they might not have had the same amount of leisure time to devote to gardening as their richer social masters, gardens here could sometimes take off on their own with just a little bit of prodding.  Grand, cultivated estates of said social masters were concerned with mimicking the fancy Stuart-era estates back in England, complete with more boxwood hedge than is healthy, but these estates do not live on in modern gardens the way that the organic development of the common man's garden would.  As for the ranks of slaves which made the great estate grounds possible, they too would leave an indelible mark on gardens and agriculture, often in the work of very famous individuals like George Washington Carver.  Carver, in fact, was my first real exposure to Black anything.  Yes, there are Black Canadians, and in fact we even have national historic sites dedicated to Black Canadians over yonder, but I did not grow up in any particular part of Ontario where I came across a Black person short of seeing a film clip of Martin Luther King Jr. marching across the bridge at Selma. 

When I was 12 we moved to southeastern Michigan, but perhaps in preparation to understand my new surroundings, my parents took me to the Henry Ford Museum and associated Greenfield Village.  At the time, there was an extensive exhibit on the work of Carver, along with a very excellent actor portraying the man in the next best thing to his flesh and blood presence.  Together with some of the people also on the tour, who happened to have dark skin, I saw my first Black people, and my impression was that they were pretty amazing with plants.  Since that time I have come to learn that no small portion of the agricultural prowess of this nation is in part to the work of men and women like Carver, and many of them, White or Black or whatever, have brought us to where we are today.  In spite of poverty, slavery, and denial to expensive formal education, these people, many from the "horrid, racist South" delivered to the rest of us from their situations complete gems. 

That said, gardening and agricultural history is still an unfurling topic of discovery for me.  Perhaps I should have become an ethno-botanist instead of the direct variety, but I find myself hungry as heck for an area of ethno-botany that does not get a lot of press these days, that of the common people of the South.  Yes, there are giant confederate flags painted on top of gas stations near airports in Atlanta and Memphis.  Yes, there are people who think that the world revolves around their little patch of free, white Alabama.  Guess what?  Those types also live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even (gasp) Southern California.  We ought never to throw out the blessings of an entire region because of a few dull stars out there in the human firmament.  In the meantime, I'm going to remain interested in Southerners like Elvis Presley and Jackie Robinson who helped to kick the crap out of the underlying racism in this country.  I'm going to remain curious about settlement patterns of Mississippi and Alabama by ordinary settlers not intent on setting up huge plantations or killing any Creek or Chocktaw in sight.  Finally, to quote Janisse Ray, I'm definitely going to be interested in gardens with subtropical elements and growing seasons that I absolutely drool in envy over. 

The South, you see, was saved not by some post-bellum Yankee restoration plan or home-grown politician trying to reclaim a ridiculous sense of false inheritance, but by the White, Black, or Native person next door. 

The Palms of Charleston

In the last post we pondered the question as to how well palms were received for ornamental purposes in past eras, at least in the United States.  As noted, very few depictions of gardens, cityscapes, landscapes, or even individual botanical subjects include palms as a regular feature, even while we also know that the settlers of the Carolinas and Georgia were certainly familiar with their abundance in the wilds around their settlements.  The islands from the Charleston area southward do indeed have the mighty Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto) growing in abundance among the pines, magnolias, myrtles, and all other sorts of wonderful Southern plants.  The Dwarf Cabbage (Sabal Minor) also grows here and north halfway up the coastal areas of North Carolina (in the west well inland to extreme southeastern Oklahoma).  Crepe Myrtles and various broadleaved evergreens are easily grown here, and considering what I had thus far seen of the new subtropical crazed South, I was expecting to see a few streets nicely lined with Cabbages, such as in the scene below:

Yes, it was humid, hence the blur.  Yes, like much of the eastern United States and Canada, everyone here seemed to be glued to a cell-phone, at least in the trendier shopping areas and business-dominated streets.

 But while there was some formality to the plantings as in the standard lined street above,the older sections of town seemed to focus slightly less on formal layouts than in fitting in vegetation wherever possible. 

That's a story for another post, but the theme of the finding is important in understanding how palms are simply everywhere here, almost like weeds.  Understand, Charleston is very groomed and formal.  Yes, some of the brickwork and paint could use some work, but the overall effect is more one of proudly displaying an aged antique.  Most of the people here have public dress which belies a concern for respectability and a sense of decorum.  Manners are refined even between people in rush hour traffic.  Once you get away from the hustle and bustle of the urban core, the cell-phones even disappear.  The backstreets have a quiet, reflective pace.  Again, this is owed another post, so back to the palms, but you get the idea.

They are allowed to grow to their own designs.  It seems wherever there is a little bit of room for soil and roots they are planted, and not necessarily to the exclusion of other trees and shrubs.  They do range naturally here, and probably spring up just as often wild as cultivated.

If this were so many other cities, the little one at the lower left would be groomed right out of existence!

But let's face it, the tourists like them, the locals have long since made them their floral emblem, and they are low demand trees.  I still question how long they have been this popular, but in some places where the overall formal lines do return, it is obvious that the Cabbage Palm has long since been a favorite of Charleston, the planned city with crooked edges. 

And really, they do look like they belong here, far more so than the imported cherries of Washington or the nearly-imported Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia Robusta) of Los Angeles and environs.  Though there are so many other reasons beyond imagination as to why one should pay a visit to Charleston, coming to see the palms is not exactly a bad thing in and of itself. 

Charleston, after all, is a special place where garden and building seemed to have been created for one another.  It's almost like a place that sprang into existence so that both concepts could be celebrated in unison.  Much like the modern lake shore of Chicago, Charleston looks as if it and the trees were trying to grow into one another.  Very few North American cities seem to make this much room for vegetation, at least not to the degree where the cityscape as a whole would be at a bit of a visual loss without it.

After all, the city owes its salvation to this wonderful tree, and the tree is etched into the human era of artifice because of that role:

Want to see more of Charleston's organic setting?  That's where I'm headed next.

Palms In The Carolina Landscape: An Historical Overview

When I recall traveling down to Fort Lauderdale back in the late 80's and early 90's for our annual winter romp from frigid Canada to tropical Southern Florida, I recall that I found narry a palm tree until one hit the Georgia-Florida border on I-95.  As if announcing that this was a truly unique land of eternal summers and palm trees even so far north near the rest of the country, palms suddenly exploded from the median.  Oh sure, Georgia nearby had a decent ground-cover of Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) that emerged from the dense pinery around about Brunswick or so, but they had nothing on the veritable carpet of them that showed once one found high and dry ground past the St. Marys River.  One notable exception stood out, that being the Jelly Palm (Butia Capitata) which grew by two as a lovely frame to the entrance of a Fieldcrest towel outlet in Smithfield, North Carolina.  This was very, very much to the north of Florida, especially to the eyes of a child who liked to exaggerate distances.

This might, in fact, have been the occasion in which I started reading about trees, way back in either the second or third grade.  I was fortunate to have a mother who was wise to the concept of providing her offspring with as much book book book as possible, and no sooner did I turn to the palm pages in lovingly acquired Florida's Fabulous Trees than I found our friend the Jelly Palm, an import from exotic subtropical southern South America.  The block of text accompanying the delightful picture of the frosty-green fronds stated that the noble plant could be found as far north as Washington, D.C.  If this were so, and people liked palm trees so much, I wondered why I only ever saw the pair outside of towel land, and none more until far into the deepest reaches of Georgia.  Believe me, I looked!

Then this last year, when I made my way to a steamy South Carolina, I found palm after palm pop up starting with some lovely Jelly Palms planted beside a pool at a Days Inn off of I-26 exit 154 near Orangeburg, South Carolina.  Why yes, I do take botanical observation locations seriously!  Anyway, anywhere downstream from that location was awash in palms as part of the landscaping.  It seems that the last two decades have seen a flurry of palm planting as people are discovering the hardier species can take a few cold nights on an otherwise humid subtropical landscape.  Humorously enough, to the equal delight and chagrin of my traveling partner, I was worried that I had to stab very far south to see palms, either wild or cultivated, as common enough features in the landscape.  The truth was that they are EVERYWHERE in lowland South Carolina.  Again, I really do not recall this being the case back in my younger days, and believe me, I was every bit as botanically precise and insane back then as I am today.  This led me to question a few things, namely just how prevalent the mighty Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto) was in older times.  Well, to start off with, the flag of South Carolina prominently features the lovely tree:

Thanks, Open Clipart!

This flag does not date back to Colonial times, but it does feature elements of one that does.  The blue field and crescent moon date from William Moultrie's original South Carolina military flag of 1775, a flag which flew over his fort to save Charleston from capture by the British.  Despite being in command of a tactically inferior force, Moultrie successfully defended the city from initial British assault.  He found that Cabbage Palm trunks are perhaps the most amusing and surprising military grade wood material known to exist on the planet.  Cannon fire from the British ships apparently bounced right off of the palm walls of his fortress, which is fairly believable considering as how the King's navy was unable to simply plow over the weaker Carolinian forces.  In 1861, when South Carolinians were getting ready to oust what they saw as Union invaders, the modern flag seen here was raised.  The Cabbage Palm, mighty defender of Charleston, was seen as a natural symbol of defiance against out-of-state invasion, and the newly-minted Confederate defenders of Fort Sumter declared themselves the heirs of the Colonial Carolinian defenders.

Like many state flags of the South, South Carolina held on to hers once Grant reminded them that their viewpoint was inappropriate, and in some cases, these flags are a sad reminder of the racism that belies a supposed continuing crusade for subsidiarity.  Don't get me wrong, I get the point of state's rights and all, I am a Canadian and therefore hold as sacred the intense power placed into the hands of individual provinces at the expense of anything not Ontari... er... you know what I mean.  Anyway, that is a post, indeed a blog and a lifetime of political and social upheaval unto itself.  Back to the point, this is one of those Southern Flags that can stand for something above and beyond what the flag makers intended, namely because it is cool enough to have an actual tree for a central figure.  Likewise, the intent of heroic defense symbolized in said tree has its greatest meaning invested in an older and far more morally-righteous rebellion.  In the north, they crowned an American Elm (Ulmus Americana) as Liberty Trees. and the economic symbol of American independence, used even on one of the first flags of the continental army, was the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).  Down here, in warm, lush South Carolina was the Cabbage Palm.  That's right, this country had trees for symbol before it had flag-dressed women or men, eagles, chopped-up snakes, or any other sort of symbol.

So if I don't remember seeing so many of them before the cold-hardy palm craze caught on, just how widely planted were they as a landscape feature for our Second-Born ancestors?  Did they tend to leave the small space trees alone when clearing their fields of otherwise broad pines and oaks?  Did they line their streets with them?  Art from the period does not really seem to show the city as being particularly gardened, at least not nearly to the extent that it is now.  Considering the relative sophistication and connections with Britain that the city did maintain in the Georgian era, one wonders why this would be the case.  Botany was extremely popular among the planters and merchants alike, and both got rich off of a thriving plant trade.  Perhaps palms did not get much press as most gardeners did not see them as being particularly hardy or useful in the place where most of the commerce was directed, rainy and cool England (unlike today where they have gained a bit of popularity).  The palms that did start catching on in Europe in Georgian times were mostly Old World palms, notably the dates and in particular the Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix Canariensis), which saw container planting use at Versailles.  I can't say I blame them, the thing is pretty freaking cool looking, and can even be trimmed into, well, a pineapple.  Down in our yard in Florida I wanted one really bad, at least as a kid who knew nothing about the difference between plants native and exotic.  I can see the appeal for people in an age when the world was still largely being discovered by everyone and the backyard took a backseat. 

Very few Georgian era depictions of Southern life bring palms into view, however.  Magnolias appear now and then, as do moss-draped oaks, but by and large paintings of the era, in fact those up until the 1860's, seem to be Colonial versions of the romantic natural visions of John Constable.  American landscape art in general seems to emulate the dreamy, sweeping romanticism he championed.  On the one hand, the concept of broad, vast frontier wilderness is celebrated, but on the other hand, art and gardens alike seemed to want to give homage as well back to manicured England, which in turn wanted to be more flowing and open like North America, and yes, I seem to really be opening a slew of topics at this point.  I end the post with a question as much as a summary of the concept of historical overview: how were palms envisioned and used by early Americans, and where have they come today?